What Are Easement Disputes and What Are Some Common Types?

Easements are more common than most people realize. For example, you might have a driveway running through your property that allows another person to access their home or vice versa because of an easement. Easements are considered nonpossessory rights to another’s property. If you have an easement to someone’s property, you don’t own anything. You just have the right to cross or access it for specific reasons. When you buy a new property, you may find that there are easements on it or easements you need that you didn’t know about. These lead to easement boundary disputes, among other things.

For instance, if you buy a property, the fact that it’s landlocked may not always come up in a title search or a seller’s property disclosure statement. You may not find out until you move in that you have no way to get to your property without crossing someone else’s or that there’s already an access easement on the house. If you need to get one so you are not trespassing simply to get to your property, you’d request an easement from your neighbor, which may lead to an easement dispute.

If you share a part of your property with your neighbor, you will need to understand how easement disputes may affect you. And we can do this by answering the most obvious question: What are easement disputes?

What are Easement Disputes?

An easement is a legal right that allows one person to use another’s property for a specific reason. You can create an easement using a deed, lease, or other recorded instrument. However, you should have an easement dispute lawyer draft it for you. They can help you cover all your bases carefully.

Easement disputes are any general discourse that leads to the creation or revokement of an easement. While there are different types of easement disputes, they are not necessarily always hostile. A friendly request to make a driveway on a neighbor’s property to access their own can be simply approved without court intervention and still be called a dispute.

What Kind of Easements Are Commonly Disputed?

Easement disputes are usually between neighbors denying or requesting easements. There are a number of reasons to request an easement, but most pertain to accessing someone’s personal property, respecting property lines, and protecting features of someone’s property. Let’s check out a few common types of easement disputes.

• Property Access – This would be when someone gets access to their landlocked property through someone else’s property. Without this easement, someone could be without legally-safe access to their own home. Access rights are usually strictly defined in the easement and can lead to a new driveway that crosses one person’s property into another.

• Property Lines – This would be after a longstanding misunderstanding of where the property lines fall. This often leads to easement boundary disputes. Say your neighbor has been building a fence or a driveway closer to your property than you think is right. You check your deed and property lines to learn that they have crossed onto your property. You can take action to prevent them from building on your property or create an easement that allows you to use what they’ve built on your property.

• Protected Views – If someone is building something like a new section of their house, or planting a tree, or anything tall, they can block a view you have from your home. If this happens, you can take legal action with a preventive easement. This can keep your neighbor from removing a view that you may consider a feature of your property.

An easement dispute attorney can negotiate on either side of these issues. For example, if you need to be sure that your neighbor won’t take advantage of your generosity and will only make a driveway on your property where you allow it, we can put it in writing. Whether you want to resolve easement boundary disputes or any other dispute, make sure to consult an experienced and skilled attorney first.

What Are Some Uncommon Easement Disputes?

As we said, most easement disputes are between neighbors, but they don’t have to be. Local, state, and federal governments and corporate entities can request easements. Depending on what they request access to, it can be difficult to fight their requests within the bounds of the law.

• Eminent Domain: The government can place an easement called eminent domain and assign a price for your land. These types of easement disputes are incredibly difficult to fight against because they are supposed to be for the benefit of the public, which takes precedence over individual property rights.

Here’s an example of how this can happen.

• Corporations may offer money or agreements for access to your property for resources or to access their own.
• These can lead to long-drawn-out lawsuits if you wish to fight them and their many financial and legal resources.
• They can even seek the government to use eminent domain to gain access to your property and its resources.

A team of easement dispute lawyers can fight for your rights against big entities that would abuse you and your individual rights. More often than not, these cases lead to settlements that better reflect the value of the lost property than the property being regained.

How Can the Easement Dispute Attorneys at MVSK Law Help?

Outside of representing you in court, we can help you through the process of finding and creating easements. We can provide title insurance which will then conduct a title search. A title search will look for any easements on your property. We’ll look to see if you have inherited any agreements and if you can or need to seek action to rectify a situation.

After discovering the problem, we can represent you in negotiations for a new easement, or for removing one, if possible. As easement dispute lawyers, we also represent clients who are asked for an easement dispute and are unsure of what that entails.

Whatever easement disputes you face, the real estate attorneys at Mazzoni Valvano Szewczyk & Karam have the knowledge and ability to help you. Contact us for a consultation.